Analytics and Actionable Insights

Forging the Path Forward in Retail

Analytics has been a buzzword in retail for a number of years now. Retailers know that data is important—and they’re gathering it. But many are still struggling to turn it into actionable insights that can improve their business. That’s a big part of what our analytics team can do. We’re focused on identifying key trends and market influences that impact our retailer partners and developing effective strategies to help them:

Stop the decline of foot-traffic in brick-and-mortar stores

Maintain market share

Give shoppers an experience they can’t get elsewhere.

Some of the work we’re helping our partners with today includes developing best practices around best-in-class benchmarking, SKU optimization and price gap management. Price gap management is particularly important for our Private Brand partners.

Earlier this year, we did a survey of top National Brand and top Private Brand items at over 35 retailers and found the average Private Brand item gets undercut 12 weeks per year. This jeopardizes the value proposition of Private Brand and results in at least a two percent loss (conservatively) in Private Brand sales. Our analysis has shown that putting a price shielding process in place results in higher lift when both items are on sale vs. independent promotions—a key insight that retailers can and should be acting on.

Category management is another primary area of focus for our team and our retailer partners. We’re working on a process that will help our partners link our proprietary research on consumer trends directly to categories to help them better understand where to place their biggest bets and how to use those insights to make smarter plans within the category. This is a big shift in focus compared to how category management has historically been done.

It also highlights the true power of analytics—finding new paths forward. That’s what retailers really need to be focused on. Because if they continue to do what they’ve always done, it will be a quick slide into irrelevancy with consumers.